Recently, China found that the head of its State Food and Drug Administration had been taking bribes, and approved a number of medications that were basically fraudulent. In an unusually harsh sentence even for China, they just executed him.

China may have trouble figuring out who's to blame on these things. They may have trouble enforcing a lot of these guidelines. But you can't say that they go easy on the ones they do blame...

After the pet food thing recently I am pretty much never buying a food product from china ever again. Still waffling on whether to continue buying non-food goods but leaning towards no. So, yeah. They'll have to kill a whole hell of a lot more people to make me change my mind on that. (tongue firmly in cheek on that last bit)

"China has become the leading supplier of many food ingredients, such as apple juice, a primary sweetener in many foods; garlic and garlic powder, a major flavor agent; sausage casings and cocoa butter.

"China now supplies 80 percent of the world's ascorbic acid — vitamin C. It's used as a preservative and nutritional enriching agent in thousands of foods. One-third of the world's vitamin A now comes from China, along with much of the supply of vitamin B-12 and many health-food supplements, such as the amino acid lysine."

That's from an NPR article. So is this:

"Four years ago, Congress passed a law requiring food to be labeled for its country-of-origin. But that doesn't extend to individual food ingredients.

"And when NPR asked major food companies where they get their ingredients and how they test them, companies either didn't respond or said those matters are proprietary secrets."

In addition, I recently heard from a news source that we import 80% of our seafood from China, believe that or don't.

I am pretty darned sure that my CSA, and my local, creameries do not use ingredients from China. How do you eat things without incredients from China? Buy things with fewer ingredients. Those of us quaint old-fashioned people call this "cooking" :)

To elaborate slightly, I used to get most of my food from Ranch99 where EVERYTHING comes from China (just about. I think I saw coke from mexico once). Will I be able to eliminate every last spec of ingredients from China forever and always? No. There might be a few mg of that chinese ascorbic acid in the multivitamins I have sitting on my desk right now. But I cook many many things from scratch now, and I know that the lettuce I had in my salad last night did not come from China because I have been to the farm where they grow it in person and talked to the farmer who grew it.

That's fair enough, as well as an enlightened lifestyle as far as I'm concerned. I was going to point out that neither of us knows where Straus Family Creamery gets the salt to put into their butter -- surely it isn't "locally mined". But I can see you understand this.

I'm wondering if someone in China took a cue from George Carlin's treaty on the death penalty -- you have to execute the people who are genuinely afraid to die. Carlin's example is "don't execute the drug dealer, execute the white-collar banker who is laundering the drug money." Which would be fine, except for that Eighth Amendment thing we've got going here.